TSES III - USS Mercy

USS Mercy, a 11,250 ton (limiting displacement) hospital ship, was built under Maritime Commission contract at Wilmington, California, as a C1-B type freighter. She was acquired by the Navy when launched in March 1943, and converted to a hospital ship at San Pedro, California. The new ship was commissioned in August 1944, and began a voyage to the south Pacific at the end of that month. In October she went to the Philippines to evacuate casualties of the invasion of Leyte and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and continued this work well into the next year. During April and May 1945 Mercy transported casualties from Okinawa to the Marianas. She then returned to the Philippines for more evacuation missions and, for nearly two months beginning in mid-June, was station hospital ship in Manila Bay. Following Japan's decision to surrender in August 1945, Mercy carried a hospital unit to Korea for occupation service. She returned to the United States in November 1945 and made a final round-trip voyage to the central Pacific between early February and early April 1946.

USS Mercy was decommissioned in mid-May of that year and transferred to the War Department for further duty as a U.S. Army Hospital Ship. She entered the Maritime Administration's James River Reserve Fleet in February 1950. Mercy remained in that agency's custody until May 1956, when she was loaned to the New York Maritime Academy and placed back into active service as the training ship Empire State III.

Again laid up in June 1960, this time in the Hudson River Reserve Fleet, she was sold to a Spanish shipbreaking firm in November 1970.